Daniel Pipes is something of a subscriber to what Rush Limbaugh calls "The Limbaugh Doctrine"--the idea that you can only achieve "peace" or "victory" in war after you have completely and utterly defeated your enemy:

Bernard Lewis spoke those memorable words to sum up the necessary goal of U.S. policy at a Hudson Institute conference two days ago. More fully, to quote a New York Sun news report, he said "the only real solution to defeating radical Islam is to bring freedom to the Middle East. Either ‘we free them or they destroy us'."

I have the highest regard for Bernard Lewis, a great Middle East historian from whom I have been learning since I entered the field in 1969. (The very first book I read in Middle East history, not surprisingly, was his Arabs in History.) But I disagree that our goal is to free the Muslim world...[my emphasis]

But I think the further point that he makes regarding what "complete victory" entails is absolutely indispensable to the argument about how to win the war on terror: It's not just a disarmed opponent with a "democratic government" thrown on top that we should be after; it is also the defeat of the ideology in the minds of those fighting us that we must seek in order to achieve true "victory." Otherwise, as Dr. Pipes points out, "freedom" just becomes an opportunity for the jihadist to prepare for future war. In this sense, I think the Left is somewhat correct when they say that we can't "impose" freedom.

Dr. Pipes adduces 2 very sound reasons for his position:

There are plenty of born-free Muslims in the West who are Islamists. Take, for example, the four 7/7 bombers in London. Freedom did nothing for them.

The goal in war has to be to defeat one's enemies, not liberate them. The invasion of Iraq, dubbed "Operation Iraqi Freedom," suffered from this mistake. The same applies to the war on radical Islam, where we must cause our enemies to feel a sense of defeat. We must crush their will. After that bitter phase has been experienced, they are then eligible for freedom.

So not only should we pursue a complete and utter military defeat of the enemy; we need to also press for an ideological victory in the mind and heart of the enemy.

For the Christian, that can only mean that in addition to the necessary physical war we're engaged in, we should at the same time ask God to cause the Gospel to be victorious in the hearts of those who hate us. That alone is true "peace."

September 26, 2006

Couldn't resist playing Devil's Advocate regarding the "Allen Affair." I have to ask--who cares if he did use the "N" word 30+ years ago if he disavows it now? Doesn't seem to hurt the senior (citizen!) senator from West Virginia that he was a member of the Ku Klux Klan many moons ago since he now disavows it. "Youthful indiscretion," right? So move on Lefties.

Despite what some may label his "bombastic" style, Mark Levin is a supreme breath of fresh air for me. He routinely says things with a force and logic that I find so compelling. I think I especially love the fact that he always comes out swinging strong. He's a Michael Savage with more precision. Maybe it's just a form of reinforcement since his thinking resonates so often with what I think and feel. Take this example today:

From Salon to AP to the New York Times. Let's see how many Republicans are quick to distance themselves from George Allen based on this kind of reporting. The Left is counting on it. These things can easily spin out-of-control on the Republican side as Republicans are often fearful of being on the wrong side of a perceived breaking scandal. I've seen it over and over again. And watch as they claim the moral high ground when doing so. [emphasis mine]

It's just.So.True. I can't say how many times I've said this. Republicans ARE prone to quickly throw ANYONE under the bus who even seems remotely in danger of being thought of us "racist." Mr. Levin hits it right on the head.

September 18, 2006

In a polarized political climate, in which elections are routinely marked by litigation and allegations of incompetent administration or outright tampering, some worry that voting problems could cast a Florida-style shadow over this fall's midterm elections.

"We could see that control of Congress is going to be decided by races in recount situations that might not be determined for several weeks," said Paul S. DeGregorio, chairman of the federal Election Assistance Commission, although he added that he does not expect problems of this magnitude.

Mm hmm. Wait till Republicans keep the House or even gain seats. Watch the "magnitude" increase. The stage must be set to be able to contest election outcomes in case the candidate of choice does not win. "We warned about this well before the elections ever took place!" will be the defense.

September 14, 2006

Thousands of primary election ballots across the state will not be counted for next week's partisan races because many absentee voters have failed to indicate at the top of the ballot if they wanted to vote as a Democrat or Republican, election officials said.

One out of 10 voters in Kitsap and King counties and two out of 10 voters in Snohomish County failed to fill in the oval at the top of the ballot to show they were voting in the Republican or Democratic primary, election officials found by looking at small groups of absentee ballots mailed in so far.

That doesn't mean none of their votes will be counted, said Bobbie Egan, spokeswoman for the King County's elections department. But only the votes in nonpartisan races, such as those for state Supreme Court, will be counted on ballots where the party is not indicated.

And if you're in a county that still allows in-person voting, the machines will catch the error:

Voters who have already mailed in their ballots cannot get them back to fix, Egan said. But voters who make this mistake at the polls in counties where they can vote in person will see their ballots spit out of the voting machine if they fail to mark a party.

Cool. Except I'm not in one of those counties. Let the Washington State voter games begin!

I ran across Dean Bartlett's commentary tonight re: famously partisan Hugh Hewitt's willingness to throw Lincoln Chafee under the bus with a view to purging the party of "RINOS":

Do you sense a contradiction? Don’t. If Lincoln Chafee’s seat were the only means by which we held the majority in the Senate, he would probably do a Jim Jeffords on us and bolt the party. Loyalty has never been his strong suit.

An even more dire circumstance would be Chafee holding the Republican caucus hostage with the implicit or explicit threat that he would shift control of the Senate to the Democrats by switching parties. Either way, Lincoln Chafee would become one of the most well known Senators in the country. And every time the cameras were on him, he would be sticking his thumb into conservative America’s eye (unless his famous inarticulateness prevented him from doing so).

At some point, if parties make their tents too big, they stop standing for anything. Ramesh thinks that time has already come; that the profligate spenders in the GOP have so mislaid the spirit of ’94, only an electoral purge can bring it back. I don’t think we’re there yet and with the war the paramount issue, the big spenders get a pass in my book that they obviously don’t deserve. [emphasis mine]

But if we come to a point where the anti-war, anti-Bolton, anti-Bush, anti-conservative judges Lincoln Chafee becomes our Most Valuable Senator, then we’ve crossed the Rubicon. So whoever Chafee’s Democratic opponent is, he, she or it has my support.

This is what grass roots conservatives like me have been saying for some time, and yet when we've said it before, we've been labeled and shouted down. I have heard both Hewitt and Medved decry this kind of thinking before. To me, it was and still is the only way to see this issue, and I said as much last May:

I'll say it often and loud: This is what happens when you elect RINOS over true conservatives. "Electability" be damned! Support the men that stand for what you stand for and trust the results to God! If you come to meet the enemy on the battlefield with 15,000 men against his 10,000, but 5,000 of yours sometimes turn on YOU, how can you meet the opposing force with determination? We need men and women we can RELY UPON in the toughest times and on the toughest issues, not namby-pamby "mavericks" who are notorious for blazing their own self-aggrandizing paths by consorting with the opposition against you on a too regular basis.

I'm conservative through my faith, and that conservatism expresses itself in my fairly regular support--verbal, monetary, and (especially) voting--of the Republican party. For some time, I've been less than enthusiastic in my support of the GOP and lately...well...it's been positively waning.

Conventional wisdom has it that the Republicans owe their current hold on the Senate, House, and Presidency primarily to the electorate's passion around just a few issues: national security and the restoration of the judiciary being chief among them.

So what to make of the situation today, when we have to rely on unpaid, self-motivated citizens to take our immigration problem head on? When we have the majority party stymied in the judicial confirmation process by a handful of rogue Democratic senators? The GOP seems weak, even while in the majority, and is apparently incapable of achieving victory on some of the most crucial issues that they were ostensibly elected to champion.

THIS is exactly where you end up when you accept liberals in place of tried and ideologically committed conservatives. When you pull up the tent pegs and move back in order to broaden the tent, don't be surprised if a lot of strangers show up to the party. My beef is that I foresaw this happening miles away.

Think about it: when you abandon conservatives like Pat Toomey, Brett Schundler, and Tom McClintock, either through lack of strong support (Brett Schundler in NJ) or through decisive support of their moderate Republican challengers (Schundler and McClintock), you end up with wishy-washy or downright contrary senators, congressmen, or governors who can't be depended upon to stand up for core Republican platform planks.

It makes governing when the majority is slim incredibly trying because the actual power wielders in the party become the moderates. In an overwhelming majority, the few moderates in the party are marginalized; their votes are not as crucial to the success of a given agenda issue because the majority is solid without them. Contrariwise, when the majority is slim every vote counts and the power of moderates consequently increases dramatically. Their votes are needed and needed badly to win. In the Senate today, at the very moment when the least amount of equivocation can be tolerated, the party finds itself captive to a handful of senators who can effectively stop any progress on judicial nominations cold. Strategically, it seems like an incredibly backward and counterproductive move to place your greatest stress on your least reliable and weakest members.

In my "regular joe" analysis, this is exactly what the GOP has done in 2005.

I ran across Dean Bartlett's commentary tonight re: famously partisan Hugh Hewitt's willingness to throw Lincoln Chafee under the bus with a view to purging the party of "RINOS":

Do you sense a contradiction? Don’t. If Lincoln Chafee’s seat were the only means by which we held the majority in the Senate, he would probably do a Jim Jeffords on us and bolt the party. Loyalty has never been his strong suit.

An even more dire circumstance would be Chafee holding the Republican caucus hostage with the implicit or explicit threat that he would shift control of the Senate to the Democrats by switching parties. Either way, Lincoln Chafee would become one of the most well known Senators in the country. And every time the cameras were on him, he would be sticking his thumb into conservative America’s eye (unless his famous inarticulateness prevented him from doing so).

At some point, if parties make their tents too big, they stop standing for anything. Ramesh thinks that time has already come; that the profligate spenders in the GOP have so mislaid the spirit of ’94, only an electoral purge can bring it back. I don’t think we’re there yet and with the war the paramount issue, the big spenders get a pass in my book that they obviously don’t deserve. [emphasis mine]

But if we come to a point where the anti-war, anti-Bolton, anti-Bush, anti-conservative judges Lincoln Chafee becomes our Most Valuable Senator, then we’ve crossed the Rubicon. So whoever Chafee’s Democratic opponent is, he, she or it has my support.

This is what grass roots conservatives like me have been saying for some time, and yet when we've said it before, we've been labeled and shouted down. I have heard both Hewitt and Medved decry this kind of thinking before. To me, it was and still is the only way to see this issue, and I said as much last May:

I'll say it often and loud: This is what happens when you elect RINOS over true conservatives. "Electability" be damned! Support the men that stand for what you stand for and trust the results to God! If you come to meet the enemy on the battlefield with 15,000 men against his 10,000, but 5,000 of yours sometimes turn on YOU, how can you meet the opposing force with determination? We need men and women we can RELY UPON in the toughest times and on the toughest issues, not namby-pamby "mavericks" who are notorious for blazing their own self-aggrandizing paths by consorting with the opposition against you on a too regular basis.

I'm conservative through my faith, and that conservatism expresses itself in my fairly regular support--verbal, monetary, and (especially) voting--of the Republican party. For some time, I've been less than enthusiastic in my support of the GOP and lately...well...it's been positively waning.

Conventional wisdom has it that the Republicans owe their current hold on the Senate, House, and Presidency primarily to the electorate's passion around just a few issues: national security and the restoration of the judiciary being chief among them.

So what to make of the situation today, when we have to rely on unpaid, self-motivated citizens to take our immigration problem head on? When we have the majority party stymied in the judicial confirmation process by a handful of rogue Democratic senators? The GOP seems weak, even while in the majority, and is apparently incapable of achieving victory on some of the most crucial issues that they were ostensibly elected to champion.

THIS is exactly where you end up when you accept liberals in place of tried and ideologically committed conservatives. When you pull up the tent pegs and move back in order to broaden the tent, don't be surprised if a lot of strangers show up to the party. My beef is that I foresaw this happening miles away.

Think about it: when you abandon conservatives like Pat Toomey, Brett Schundler, and Tom McClintock, either through lack of strong support (Brett Schundler in NJ) or through decisive support of their moderate Republican challengers (Schundler and McClintock), you end up with wishy-washy or downright contrary senators, congressmen, or governors who can't be depended upon to stand up for core Republican platform planks.

It makes governing when the majority is slim incredibly trying because the actual power wielders in the party become the moderates. In an overwhelming majority, the few moderates in the party are marginalized; their votes are not as crucial to the success of a given agenda issue because the majority is solid without them. Contrariwise, when the majority is slim every vote counts and the power of moderates consequently increases dramatically. Their votes are needed and needed badly to win. In the Senate today, at the very moment when the least amount of equivocation can be tolerated, the party finds itself captive to a handful of senators who can effectively stop any progress on judicial nominations cold. Strategically, it seems like an incredibly backward and counterproductive move to place your greatest stress on your least reliable and weakest members.

In my "regular joe" analysis, this is exactly what the GOP has done in 2005.

I have heard so many times from critics of the president's decision to prosecute the war on terror: "He [Bush] (or sometimes even "We") can't even find Osama Bin Laden!"

Last I checked, Bush isn't in Delta Force, Special Ops or anything of the sort. Most of the time, his whereabouts are pretty well known, and it almost always leaves him with little or no time to be off scaling the rugged hills of Afghanistan. After all, this is the guy who is derided for not having the foresight to see 9/11 coming so he was caught in dereliction of duty reading a book to school children when the planes hit the WTC. I guess he was supposed to be piloting an F-15 in the air over ManHattan like ANY decent president would have done.

I might be off here, but I thought we had specially trained guys with knives between their teeth and Gee-whiz weapons in their arsenals who do the really spiffy manhunt stuff? So if that's the case, aren't the armchair S.E.A.L team leaders really slamming the ability of the troops in the field, not the commander-in-chief?

A military jury today convicted a Navy chaplain of a misdemeanor count of disobeying his commanding officer for wearing his uniform while delivering a prayer "in Jesus' name" at an assembly in front of the White House.

"But I had prior written permission to wear my uniform if it was a religious observance, (so) prayers are not a religious observance," Lt. Gordon James Klingenschmitt told WND after the military court-martial recessed for the night.

"Therefore I disobeyed my commanding officer's order not to pray in uniform," he said.

Klingenschmitt, who raised immediate concerns with this superiors when the Navy issued a new order that prayers could only be "nonsectarian," also has alleged he was punished for raising those concerns, and later notifying Congress and President Bush of the situation.

I have to admit right up front that something about this chaplain and his situation doesn't sit right with me, but I'll have to save that for later. I sense something more was going on besides just trying to "pray in Jesus name." I'm going to leave it with a guess that it has more to do with him wearing his uniform at a "political" effort (which implies activity officially sanctioned by the Navy). But apart from this chaplain's issue, I DO think that there very much is a movement to muzzle chaplains in the name of being non-sectarian and have seen it firsthand myself.

I have seen over my tenure in the military reserve, an increasing tendency to limit distinctive expressions of a particular faith out of "respect" for all those present. For instance, I have heard complaints that at an individual's retiremen ceremony, some were "offended" because the chaplain who gave the benediction ended the prayer in Jesus name. This has occurred more than once, even at retirements where the retiree was a vocal Christian who WANTED a Christian chaplain to officiate. In another venue where I had a prepared speech in which I was going to use the term "Judeo-Christian heritage," a Lt Col objected to my wording with the comment, "Well what about the Budhist that may be present?" as if that negated mentioning the concept of a Judeo-Christian heritage.

The fact is, while military chaplains are required to answer the religious needs of all military personnel, they are drawn from a particular faith. That is, there are Baptist chaplains, Catholic chaplains, Jewish chaplains, and so on. When you ask them for their services, it stands to reason that they'll do so from the perspective of their particular tradition. This has traditionally been the case and it has only been recently that there seems to be some traction with the opposing view.

What is happening now is an increasingly vocal effort to make a "one-size-fits-all" chaplaincy that offers "religious services" from the viewpoint of a generalized, nondescript "religion" that has been shorn of any distinctives so as to avoid offending anyone. In short, a chaplaincy of no particular faith at all.

So why even have a chaplaincy? Why have benedictions, convocations and so on? Doesn't prayer offend some atheists? I suppose it's not such an odd thing to see an organization that claims to be offering a service to God stopping others from doing so. It's certainly old hat for Christians:

"But in order that it may spread no further among the people, let us warn them to speak no more to anyone in this name." 18 So they called them and charged them not to speak or teach at all in the name of Jesus."